Betty McKemie opens her scrapbook and smiles as her eyes fall on the landing card that admitted her to America.

"I never saw the Statue of Liberty that day," she says in a gentle accent that's a bit Southern and quite a bit British — sort of an English drawl.

Courtesy of Betty McKemie (ENLARGE)

Frank and Betty McKemie married in September 1945 and spent their honeymoon in Tintagel, Cornwall, England.

BITA HONARVAR / Staff (ENLARGE)

Betty McKemie and her husband, Frank, met in early 1944.

TALES OF MORE WAR BRIDES How did Brits feel about their women leaving with Yanks? • Mollie Parry King got a clue when she left Wales in 1946 to join her husband, William D. King, in Colbert, Ga. As her ship left port, it passed a returning troopship. "What's your cargo?" the troopship signaled. War brides, came the answer. Then a British accent cried across the water: "Why ... didn't ... you ... wait?" • In the States, war brides were almost universally welcomed, says historian Jenel Virden, who studied the women for her book "Good-bye, Piccadilly." But she did find problems: • One bride married into a Polish-American family and was shocked to discover that her in-laws and most of her neighbors spoke no English. • A group of newly arrived brides was waiting at a train station when they noticed a sign for "colored toilets." They were about to charge into the restroom to see this amazing American innovation — toilets of different colors! — when a local woman pulled them aside to explain. • Virden's own war bride mother disliked her new home in Iowa. When her husband's family passed her a bowl of corn, she scoffed, "It's maize. My mother feeds that to the chickens." Despite the cultural bumps, most of the marriages stuck. Of the 100 or so brides Virden surveyed, only 8 percent divorced. — Jim Auchmutey

That day was 60 years ago. As McKemie's ship steamed into New York harbor, hundreds of British war brides lined the rails to behold the symbol of their new home. But she wasn't among them.

McKemie had been paged with word that her husband of six months would be waiting at the pier. So instead of sightseeing, she went below to pack. When the ship docked, she put him to work toting a heavy case that held her collection of 78 rpm records.

"I wasn't sure they would have a classical music station where I was going," she explains. "They didn't."

McKemie was going to southwest Georgia to start a new life as the wife of a U.S. Army doctor. She was part of a remarkable migration of British women who had married American servicemen stationed overseas during World War II. For eight months in 1946, a flotilla of ships that had recently ferried troops to Europe transported 48,000 of their spouses, children and fiancées back across the Atlantic.

"I felt rather like a mail-order bride," McKemie says, sitting in the parlor of her home in Avondale Estates, the English-themed village where she and her husband, Frank, moved after 3 1/2 decades in Albany.

Now 80, she's a slender woman with fine features and a polite manner that seems at once properly British and Southern. As she leafs through the scrapbook, her husband, a tall, lanky man in his late 80s, enters with the help of a cane and takes a seat. He's hard of hearing and can't follow what his wife is saying over the classical music drifting in from a kitchen radio.

She looks at him sweetly and raises her voice. "I'm talking about all the things I gave up to come live with you."

A relationship blooms

The McKemies met a few months before D-Day when Frank wandered into the small-town library where Betty's mother was working.

Betty Bonser was from London. When war broke out and the Luftwaffe began attacking the city, an unexploded bomb fell in her family's front yard. They fled the destruction and moved upriver to Shiplake-on-Thames, her barrister father commuting to work in the city. Then a V-1 buzz bomb flattened his law office.

One day in early 1944, Capt. Frank McKemie, one of 3 million U.S. service members who passed through Britain during the war, stopped by the library and struck up a conversation with Betty's mother. She invited him and two other soldiers home for Sunday lunch. Frank returned the following Sunday, not so much for the roast duck as for the Bonsers' 17-year-old daughter.

"She was pretty," he says, "and she had such a sunny disposition."

The couple rode bicycles together and took long walks along the Thames, talking about music and books. Frank told her about his home in Coleman, Ga., in the deep country south of Columbus.

Betty knew a little about the South. She had seen "Gone With the Wind" at Leicester Square in London, but she realized there was more to the story. She also had read Lillian Smith's controversial book about lynching, "Strange Fruit."

"My father had some reservations about me coming to Georgia," she says. "He said there was going to be a lot of trouble there."

Father was right. His daughter was living in Albany when the trouble came years later during the civil rights protests of the early '60s. At one point, some people there wanted to close the library rather than desegregate it. McKemie circulated a petition to keep it open.

"A city without a library," she says, "would have been unthinkable."

Voyage to America

Eleven days after the D-Day invasion, Frank landed in Normandy and followed the fighting across the continent into Germany. Not until the war ended was he able to return to England and marry Betty in her parish church. Soon he was discharged and went back to Georgia to await his wife.

In the fall of 1945, tens of thousands of British war brides were anxious to rejoin their husbands, but there was little transportation available for them. Few planes flew across the Atlantic in those days, and most ships were being used to carry millions of servicemen home. In their frustration, hundreds of brides staged protests in front of the U.S. Embassy in London.

The U.S. Army finally organized a ferry system of 20 former troopships, with assistance from the Red Cross. Brides would gather at a military camp in southern England, and then it was on to the New World. Other ships took brides from elsewhere in Europe.

"It was a brave undertaking. Many of them left thinking they would never see their homes or families again," says historian Jenel Virden of the University of Hull in England, who wrote a book about the migration, "Good-bye, Piccadilly."

The first ship arrived in New York in February 1946 to a cheering crowd, newsreel cameras and cute banner headlines like "Wives Aweigh" and "Here Come the Brides."

Beyond the hoopla, problems developed. The ships were overcrowded and ill-equipped to deal with infant medical complications. On one voyage that spring, nine babies died during an outbreak of diarrhea. In response, U.S. authorities decreed that no infants under 6 months and no mothers more than 6 months pregnant could board.

No such tragedies marred Betty McKemie's passage.

She left England in March with 1,388 women and children aboard the John Ericsson, a luxury liner that had been stripped and pressed into service as a troop carrier. It was jammed like all the ships, but it offered one amenity that impressed women who had lived through six years of wartime rationing: an abundance and variety of food.

"I had forgotten what a banana looked like," McKemie says.

Not that all the brides could enjoy the fare. Many of them were seasick.

McKemie turns her scrapbook to the pages about the voyage, where she preserved copies of the ship's newspaper, the Seaweed Gazette. There's a poem in one issue:

The seas are rough, the liner rides

"I had a lower berth," she recalls. "I wouldn't have taken it if I had known that the girl in the upper bunk was going to be sick all the time."

Red Cross representatives staffed the ship and kept the ladies busy with dance lessons and classes on U.S. currency and American English. (Remember: What we call roll-ons the Yanks call girdles.) The Seaweed Gazette chipped in with a primer on clothes sizes and thumbnail introductions to the states (New Jersey, it claimed, was the Mosquito State).

One newspaper feature touched on the women's deepest anxiety. The Inquiring Reporter asked brides whether their husbands would love them as much as they did when they were married.

"I'll kick him in the teeth if he doesn't," answered a Mrs. Cater, one of 11 wives bound for Georgia.

For most of the voyage, McKemie says, she was too excited about starting her new life to feel homesick. Her mood changed on the day before they landed. At a farewell dinner and chapel service, the brides promised to keep in touch and wept as they sang the hymn "God Be With You Till We Meet Again."

"I never doubted my decision," she says. "But for the first time, I realized how far from home I would always be."

Adapting to the South

After their reunion in New York, the McKemies took a train to Atlanta, which was ablaze with springtime azaleas and dogwoods. Like most of the brides, Betty had only woolens to wear, so her first order of business was to go shopping at Davison's for lighter-weight clothes.

"It was hotter than a cracker box that first summer," she says, recalling how she would take showers and lie on the bed under a lazy ceiling fan trying not to sweat. Air conditioning was uncommon then. She soon broke out in a heat rash.

From Atlanta, the couple drove to southwest Georgia to meet Frank's family, who farmed and raised cattle. They hit it off famously. His sister even offered to take Betty fishing and warned her to watch for chigger bites.

Chiggers? she asked.

While they were on the pond, Betty saw a snake swimming through the water. "I don't think I'd ever seen a snake before," she says. " I decided I didn't want to go fishing again."

McKemie was a minor celebrity at first, the subject of newspaper write-ups and Rotary invitations. As the novelty wore off, she eventually settled in to her new life as a doctor's wife in Albany. She helped found a symphony guild. She became a naturalized citizen and was awarded a citizenship medal from the Daughters of the American Revolution. She raised five children.

For a time, McKemie stayed in touch with a few of the other brides in Georgia. Some were unhappy, complaining about the climate, the native diet and how they could never find the things they missed from England.

McKemie would have none of it. "I wanted to assimilate," she says. "You have to bloom where you're planted."

It helped that much of her family followed her to the States.

After her father died in the late '40s, her mother moved to Georgia to be near her only daughter. One brother attended Emory University and stayed in Atlanta. Another moved to Albany, working hard to erase his British accent so he could sell insurance to Georgians.

McKemie didn't go that far in adapting. In fact, she clings to one custom from the old country every day.

As she closes her scrapbook, she notices that it's almost 4 o'clock.

"Would you like a spot of tea?" she asks.

She excuses herself and returns in a few minutes with a tray of teacups and a platter of cookies and finger sandwiches. She offers them to her husband, who has never regretted walking into that library six decades ago.